Tag: avocado dye

Augmenting colour strength of first screen prints

Although prints with natural dye pastes of my photographs worked... steaming reduced the depth of colour on some.  The background dyed colour also impeded a clear print to stand out.  To augment their depth of colour, I made a new screen, for some images, with paint brush and chinagraph artwork, based on the original photograph. This gives a clearer printed outline of Sepia colour. New Sepia print pastes with natural dyes, based on avocado are made each time of printing.  Adding and simmering extra dye material: Coreopsis Roulette, Black Knight Scabious flowers and Hop Black Sunflower seeds keeps the strength of colour strong enough for a better print on silk.

The Print Redefining

By making a new artwork for the screen, the area to be printed can be controlled, using less print paste, whereas using the actual photograph can result in large areas to be printed, including half tone, which uses up a lot of valuable natural print paste.  The natural brush marks and chinagraph pencil marks create a more solid, defined area of marks when printed.

There is evidence that leaving prints un-steamed for a week to a month, helps cure the dye, before steaming.